The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  “If you don’t live up to your end of the bargain, I don’t see why I should live up to mine.”

  “You’ll get your goddamned money, every last penny of it!” Charles shouted furiously. “It’s just going to take more time, that’s all! You can make all the threats you want, it won’t make anything happen faster!”

  Thibodeau blanched. He picked up an empty beer bottle from the kitchen counter, and a violent convulsion seemed to go through his body. Instinctively, Charles threw himself to one side, but the bottle never left his father’s hand; Thibodeau stared at Charles for a second, then gave a strange smile, and for a time father and son stared at one another in silence.

  “Watch your manners, sonny boy,” the carpenter eventually said in a low voice, black with rage. “You remember what happened the last time you forgot yourself? Eh? You maybe don’t live with me any more, but you’re still my son, don’t forget that!”

  He put the bottle down, and, having regained his calm, spoke in a cold, detached tone.

  “Do what you want, it’s not my problem. But if you come here ten days from now with less than two hundred bucks, don’t bother coming at all.”

  Charles nodded and left the apartment, feeling more humiliated than he had ever felt before in his entire life.

  When he met with De Bané the next day, there was a short discussion that ended with De Bané understanding that Charles would work for him two nights a week delivering merchandise to his customers, but that there would be a maximum of five or six customers per night. On the other hand, De Bané would pay him no more than thirty dollars a night, and his territory was expanded considerably.

  “What do you want from me, old buddy? Business ain’t so good as it was.… When things pick up, you’ll benefit as much as I will.”

  Despite his pride, Charles asked De Bané for a two-hundred-dollar advance, to get his father off his back. De Bané agreed so readily that Charles was taken aback. “He thinks he’s got me on his hook for good,” he thought as he walked home. “Well, my good man, you’ll soon see who’s in control.”

  Steve Lachapelle was bored to death living in Pointe-Saint-Charles. His boredom had been getting worse and worse since spring. He no longer went to school unless he felt like it, which wasn’t often, and he compensated for his lack of classroom learning by devoting most of his time to honing his skills in the arcades and pool halls of his neighbourhood. But they didn’t come close to filling the void that was consuming him.

  Louisa, his Haitian girlfriend, had broken up with him the previous week. He thought it was funny, how it happened. The night before, they had made love like a colony of rabbits, after which Louisa, at Steve’s request, had left him her pretty pink slip with the lime-green lace trim, saying with an obscene gesture and a snigger or two that she had a pretty good idea what he was going to do with it. Then she had given him a long, hot goodbye kiss.

  “It’s going to be a long night without you, my beautiful little teddy bear,” he’d whispered in her ear. Then she’d left.

  As far as Steve was concerned, it had indeed been a long night, and he had finally been obliged to make use of the slip.

  The next afternoon he’d called her to make a date. In a quiet but cool, clipped voice she’d told him she was busy, without giving him any details.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow. And not any other night, either.”

  He’d thought at first she was joking, and he gave his long Apache cry, like a wolf howling at the moon, a signal that he wasn’t going to let her treat him that way. But after a few minutes he had to admit to himself that she had really tossed him into the garbage like a sack of rotten oranges. He therefore dredged up all his oratorical skills and finally managed to get her to agree to meet him in a restaurant for ten minutes – ten lousy minutes were all he could get for his efforts.

  She was waiting for him, a pained expression on her face. She looked a little contrite, he thought, but with an air of having come to a decision. That worried him. She was as pretty as ever, wearing a fabulous pink dress that he hadn’t seen before, and she kept her hands folded on the table, looking at the tips of her fingers as though they held the secret to the cause of their breakup. He took one of them in his and noticed that she was also wearing a ring with an enormous diamond on it – a fake, of course, but a high-quality fake. He’d never seen the ring before, either. He asked her where it came from. She answered vaguely, looking away, then in one breath she told him she had found someone else. The news nearly knocked him over.

  “Since when?”

  “Not that long,” she replied, looking more and more uneasy. She refused to tell him another thing.

  After a few minutes, not having pried another word out of her, he got up, picked up his helmet, and tapped the tip of her nose with the visor.

  “Poor little Louisa. You’ve been whoring around, haven’t you? You should be more careful. You never know what you might pick up.”

  And he left the restaurant. She came out on his heels. There was a huge brute with a red crewcut waiting for her in a Cadillac. She climbed in beside him, looking pathetic; he put his arm around her shoulder and gave poor Steve a tiny but ironic nod. Steve knew that he stood about as much chance against this guy and his money as a snail against a bulldozer. He contented himself with a few obscene gestures, shaking his rear end at them and mimicking a sodomite reaching an orgasm. The man burst out laughing and the Cadillac took off with a deep, contented purr.

  The street on which Steve lived was remarkable for the number of bottles, cans, wrappers, and other detritus that littered it, but it was even more encumbered than usual this year by an astonishing number of Christmas trees, which, despite the lateness of the season, were sticking out of the melting snow that lined the sidewalks, pathetically waving their bits of tinsel in the breeze.

  Steve considered them for a moment, made a disgusted face that lowered his left ear a fraction of an inch, and decided he definitely needed a change of air. He’d pay Charles a visit. He hadn’t seen him for a long time and it would be good to talk to him. But first he had to put something in his stomach. He hurried into his house, where his mother was talking on the telephone (on a good day, she could have supplied the entire telephonic network of Montreal with conversations); he managed to get her off long enough to take it into the bathroom and make a private call. Céline answered the phone. Charles was off making deliveries, she said, but he’d be home for supper.

  “I’ll surprise him,” Steve decided.

  He gave the phone back to his mother, who resumed her interrupted conversation, and made three enormous peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches – two of which he ate himself and the third he kept to eat on the way – and headed for the metro.

  When he showed up at Charles’s house, they were just finishing supper. He thought he could have been made to feel a tad more welcome.

  “Bad timing,” Charles told him. “I’ve got more deliveries to make.”

  “For the pharmacy?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Steve said, intrigued. “We can chat as we go.”

  Charles shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said in a low voice. “I’d be too ashamed.”

  “Ashamed? Ashamed of what?”

  Charles cursed himself for having let that slip out, and tried to think of some way to divert Steve’s suspicions, but nothing came to him.

  “I’ll tell you some other time. I’m not up to it at the moment.”

  “Hey, don’t go shushing me up, old buddy! What’s the matter, are you dealing drugs or something? Peddling your ass? Eh? You wouldn’t be the first of my gang to get into it, but I’d never have guessed it of you!”

  Charles stared at the floor in silence, more and more embarrassed. Then he sighed and shook his head as though ridding it of a tormenting thought.

  “No, some other time.”

  “Okay, okay.… Keep your little secrets locked up in your little he
art, sweetie. I doubt if I’d find them that interesting anyway.”

  “I have to go alone, Steve. It’d be too complicated with someone else there.… Don’t make faces at me! Okay, I’ve got a bit of time. Let’s go somewhere for a Coke. But I warn you, fifteen minutes and I have to go.”

  He sighed again. The two boys walked towards rue Ontario.

  “Things aren’t going so well for me, either,” Steve confided when they were seated at a table. “I had a load of shit dropped on my head this afternoon.”

  And he recounted the story of Louisa’s betrayal. Charles waxed indignant: the sick feeling that had been churning his insides for days seemed to have let up a bit.

  “Count yourself lucky, Steve. If she can be bought that easily she couldn’t have been worth much. You’re better off without her.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but still.… What a girl, man. I really thought she was the one, you know, deep down? She was the best, you don’t know how good she was. Oho! Hey, sourpuss, I just realized why you’ve been sitting there wheezing like a broken accordion: it’s because of that actress of yours, isn’t it?”

  Charles hadn’t been able to keep from telling Steve about Brigitte Loiseau, to whom he was still delivering Valium.

  “You’re out of your gourd, you dummy,” he said, half telling the truth. “Stop interrogating me. You haven’t got a clue!”

  Still full of roast beef from dinner, Charles drank his Coke slowly, more out of solidarity with Steve, who, with tears in his eyes, had gone back to fulminating against the faithless Louisa. Charles tried to console him, telling him that a guy with his silver tongue would find another girl in no time. Then, glancing at his watch, he said he had to be going.

  “We hardly see each other any more,” Steve said. “And when we do, lately anyway, you’ve had a face on you like a funeral director. Get yourself straightened out, man. I’m worried about you. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose one.”

  Charles shook his hand – a solemn and unusual gesture in their circle, and one heavy with significance.

  “Call me the day after tomorrow. We’ll play some pool at the Orleans.”

  He returned home, slipped along the side of the house, and went into the backyard. It was already almost dark. After making sure no one was watching, he opened the shed and took his delivery bag, which he’d hidden under an old tarpaulin, and quietly went back the way he had come.

  He had three deliveries to make. He was saving the Blond Angel for last. The last time, she’d invited him to stay for a coffee. They’d talked for a while; she hadn’t said anything particularly extraordinary, but she’d been so relaxed, so soft and confiding, that he’d felt almost honoured to be in her presence. He could have sat for hours letting her voice wash over him, watching the graciousness of her movements, the purity of her face that contrasted so sharply with her deadly habits. She’d told him about her life as an actress, which she loved but was thinking of giving up because there were so many hurdles. He’d tried to dissuade her, speaking so eloquently and admiringly of her talents that she’d smiled, touched and amused and almost comforted. Then she’d asked him about his life, what he liked, who his friends were, and he’d told her things he hadn’t thought he would, the kind of confidences one makes only with strangers who have made a real impression. The phone had rung. She’d got up, said a few words in a low voice, and when she’d returned there was something in her face, a vague embarrassment, that had told Charles it was time for him to leave.

  The night was warm and humid, the breeze redolent with the mingled odours of the city and the first hints of summer. He felt wrapped in them as he walked rapidly along the street, suddenly filled with a kind of luminous joy. “By the time the weather turns hot,” he told himself, “I’ll be finished with this disgusting business for good.”

  The first customer lived on rue Préfontaine, not far from Hochelaga and a few doors from the metro station. He was a fat, bald man with soft features, as though he were melting; he took the envelope Charles gave him with a weak hand and gave him back a handful of warm coins as a tip, which was unusual since De Bané’s pills didn’t come cheap and almost never inspired generosity on the part of his clients.

  The next customer lived not far from there, on rue Dézéry. Charles rang two or three times, waited in the hall shuffling his feet impatiently, then left muttering curses: he would have to come back the next day without knowing if anyone would be there then, either, since De Bané never gave him his customers’ names or phone numbers.

  That left only the Blond Angel of rue Rachel. He quickened his pace, hoping she would ask him in for another conversation. Although he’d been a long way from La Fontaine Park, he made the trip in twenty-five minutes.

  “Damn it!” he muttered when no one answered her door either.

  Maybe she was sleeping, as she had been the first time? He rang again, then twice more, then paced back and forth on the landing, waiting, for what, he didn’t know. A huge tabby cat with wide jowls ran out from behind the building, started up the stairs, and then stopped, meowing quietly and staring up at Charles, not daring to continue. “Maybe it’s her cat,” he thought. He knelt down and called to the animal, rubbing his thumb on the tips of his fingers as though he had some food for it. The cat took a couple of cautious steps up, then, seized by some undefinable fear, turned and ran back the way it had come, uttering cries of lamentation.

  Charles stood up, surprised by its reaction, and tried to see where it had gone. He was suddenly overcome by a strange presentiment. He rang the doorbell again, and when there was still no response he tried the knob. The door opened. He stepped into the vestibule and called out. There was no sound from the darkened apartment except the echo of his own voice; he felt a chill come over him. “Odd she didn’t lock the door when she left,” he said to himself, taking a few more steps inside.

  Then, in the living room, where the light from a street lamp came faintly through the venetian blinds, he saw a figure lying on the sofa in a strange position, one arm flung across her face and the other trailing on the carpet.

  His heart began pounding so furiously in his chest that he could barely breathe.

  “Mademoiselle Loiseau,” he murmured, terrified and befuddled.

  She didn’t move. Her stillness filled the room like a thick, viscous liquid on the point of bursting through the walls. He leapt forward and seized her hand. It fell back to the floor, absolutely lifeless.

  But then she emitted a faint groan. Quickly, almost violently, he removed the arm from her face. Her mouth was half open, her skin pale. She had sunk into a terrible sleep, the kind from which it seemed there would be no return. He shook her with all his strength, shouting at her to wake up. Her mouth opened again and another groan escaped her lips. Her face was hideous.

  “Oh God,” he cried, standing back. “She’s dying and it’s my fault.”

  He stared at her, appalled. Her forehead glistened with sweat, and he saw her eyes begin to flutter. He must call an ambulance. But not from there. It was too risky. He hurried out the door, down the staircase, and began running along the street looking for a pay phone. As he ran he kept repeating to himself: “I killed her. The Blond Angel, I killed her!” His tears mingled with the sweat that stung his eyes.

  He saw a phone booth at the corner of a parking lot. In an instant he was talking to a 911 operator.

  “Address? Just a minute!”

  In his distress he couldn’t remember it. Fortunately he still had De Bané’s list. He fumbled furiously in one pocket, then another, uttering a string of swear words punctuated by sobs. Finally he found it.

  “Hurry, for Chrissakes! She’s dying. Dying! My name?”

  He almost gave it, but a scrap of lucidity held him back. He hung up the phone and ran away as though the police were already on his heels. He ran all the way to rue Ontario, then stopped, out of breath. He thought about returning to the Blond Angel’s apartment to make sure th
at the ambulance was there and she was being taken care of. But he was afraid of drawing attention to himself. What could he do?

  He could drink. He could drink a lot, to settle the turbulence that was coursing through his head. He thought of going to the Orleans, and headed in that direction. Nadine would sell him a beer under the counter, he was sure of it. And maybe De Bané would be there. He’d be very happy to run into De Bané! It would be his farewell to Montreal. The city didn’t need an angel-killer.

  15

  It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Fernand and Lucie were sleeping, and Céline was watching television, sitting on the rug close to the set, which was turned down low. Rosemary’s Baby was on, a Polanski film that one of her friends had said was terrific. Since she couldn’t sleep, and her math class the next day was cancelled, she thought it was a good chance to stay up and watch it.

  It started out as a story of a young couple in love but soon began to take a sinister turn, and she was beginning to feel afraid. She would have liked Charles to have been there with her, or at least Henri, but they had both left the house after supper and God alone knew what they were up to.

  How horrid she would feel if she found herself in Rosemary’s shoes! Carrying a thing in her belly for nine months that came straight from Hell! She couldn’t watch. She wanted to turn a light on, since the living room was lit only by the glow from the TV screen and seemed almost as frightening as the movie.

  Suddenly she heard the knob on the front door squeak and someone coming into the vestibule. Which of the two had come in? She obviously hoped it was Charles, and turned to watch the gap in the living-room door to see who passed it. And it was Charles. In the split second it took him to pass the opening she could tell that something was wrong. His head was bowed and he seemed to walk with a shaky step.